Seite - 470 - in Jacopo Strada and Cultural Patronage at the Imperial Court - The Antique as Innovation, Band 1

Chapter 9470 9.8.2 Roman Castrametatio Given that this Imperial theme was very much alive at court, it is probable that Maximilian intended that the Neugebäude included explicit references to his Roman predecessors. Given the spot and its historical association, the most obvious way to do this was to imitate, instead of the Sultan’s camp, the castrum of a Roman army. Maximilian can at least have had an inkling of what that may have looked like, if not directly from the historical sources such as Polybius, Vegetius or Caesar, than from contemporary popularizations or from discus- sions with humanist experts. But even had he not, in Strada’s collection he disposed of expert visual documentation. Not only was Strada himself study- ing Caesar’s wars, in order to be able to provide his planned complete edition of the Commentaries with detailed and reliable illustrations, but fifteen years earlier he had explicitly commissioned Sebastiano Serlio to prepare a detailed reconstruction of the castrametatio of the Romans as described by Polybius, which he intended to publish likewise.63 Serlio had been working on this theme earlier: at the behest of Francis i, he had made a huge plan (of nine feet square) of Polybius’ entrenched camp, and a similar map of a modern fortified town based on Polybius’ plan, intended for two fortified garrison-towns the French king intended to build at his borders with Piedmont and Flanders. These projects had likewise been acquired by Strada, and thus were accessible to Maximilian [Fig. 9.41]. The square plan, the round towers at the corners and along the walls which consist of piers buttressing a curtain wall are features that correspond to the upper garden of the Neugebäude; the location of the staff headquarters, the Praetorium or Principium, might be related to that of the main building of Maximilian’s palace. These correspondences suggest that Serlio’s drawings did influence Maximilian to some extent when he was conceiving his new gar- den. Nevertheless it is very questionable that Maximilian intended a more or less precise imitation of a Roman camp: in that case he doubtless would have also imitated its most salient feature, its inner division in more or less equal 63 Index sive catalogus, nr. 33. Strada had these illustrations engraved in Venice; in his pref- ace to the Settimo Libro he describes them as Serlio’s ‘Eight book’. A set of drawings from Fugger’s library, now in the Staatsbibliothek München, Cod. Icon. 190, doubtless acquired through Strada’s mediation, may have been his source, but in view of the differences in his description it is more likely that Strada owned a second, slightly different version; see Serlio/Fiore/Carrunchio 1994. On Strada’s illustrated edition of Caesar (Caesar 1575(a), which is paralleled by Palladio’s project, which came out in the same year (Caesar 1575(b), see Jansen 2004, pp. 188–191. It should be noted that Strada’s Lyon friend Guillaume du Choul also published a treatise, Discours sur la castrametation et discipline militaire des Romains (Lyon 1554), which was repeatedly reprinted and translated in Italian (1559).